Mercy at the Highest Cost
by codenamecynic
Summary: The final confrontation with the Archdemon looms on the horizon; the Warden asks Zevran to make her a promise in the quiet before battle. (Past alistair/warden; unrequited zevran/warden)


She sits in the dark in his room at Redcliffe, turning an empty wine glass slowly on the table. Zevran is not terribly surprised to see her.

Any other night and there would be pithy innuendo and sly asides dripping from his mouth, his lips a fountain of pretty lies to distract from the true things he says. He doesn't speak, just lays his weapons down at the end of his empty bed and comes to sit with her.

Moonlight through the window flickers coolly, leaving a hatch mark of shadows on her skin. He draws in a slow, deep breath when she meets his gaze across the table; an inaudible gasp beneath water, her eyes like stones that weigh heavy in his chest. He's seen her look before, has seen it writ like a frantic confession on the faces of those whose lives he exchanged for cold coin; the last page of a book where the words abruptly end, a history of the moment when the lights come up and death is recognized in the shadow it throws across the floor.

It hurts. He isn't prepared for how much though he knows he's seen this moment coming, closer and closer like the sun edging higher in the eastern sky. Eventually the shadows disappear, but he longs for them, turning his face away from hers and into the darkness.

"Things have been set in motion," she says finally. The base of the glass grates silently on the table as it moves, a slow circle. He can feel it in his bones.

"Things?"

He meets her eyes again and immediately regrets it, still blue as Rialto Bay in the springtime. He misses- He's going to miss-

"Things I can't do anything about now." She doesn't explain any further than that and he doesn't ask. "You told me when I spared your life that you were my man."

"Yes."

"Without reservation. Is that still true?"

His throat closes, and the word burns like salt in wounds as it shoulders its way past his tongue. "Yes."

The silence sits between them for a long time, a thousand of his heartbeats echoing in his ears. Her steady gaze only flickers once, the pulse in her throat leaping at the edge of the high collar of her robes. "Good. I'm going to need your help"

She's afraid; he can feel fear flickering around her like the icy corona of one of her spells, and it makes his hands tighten to fists where he keeps them pressed against his thighs. There is a moment where he is sure that she is about to send him away; she's never shown any trepidation in asking him to kill, pragmatic in a way he would not have expected from a Circle mage.

Would he go if she ordered him to? He doesn't know. They are so close to the end that he cannot imagine not being there to see it finished, not being at her side when the Archdemon falls.

And it must. He has never doubted her, not for a single moment since their first long conversation with him on his back in the dirt and her kneeling on his chest, her little boot knife jammed under his chin. He's always admired her too, as a Warden, as a woman, but that is neither here nor there. She has never been his and now that Alistair is doomed to sit upon the Ferelden throne, the only claim on her is the taint in her blood.

It's the only claim that matters, but there is part of him that will always regret -

He has many regrets, what is one more in the long scheme of things, though he looks into her face and wonders how he finds himself in these strange places where the cost of mercy is so unforgivably high.

"What would you have of me?"

She almost looks- grateful.

"When the Archdemon falls, a Warden must be the one to strike the killing blow. Riordan, or I- It can't be Alistair. Not unless there is no other option. Ferelden needs him on the throne." Her voice shimmers on the edge of his hearing, thin-skinned and brittle, a dying man's last breath bubbling up from the ocean floor. "If he tries, I need you to stop him."

"And what will happen to you?"

A single droplet beads on the table near her fingers. She's so steady in the waves he almost doesn't see it, the moment her eyes spill over with tears like stormwater over the sides of a ship. "I can't tell you. At least I shouldn't."

And yet that is more than enough of an answer.

There is a part of himself that is still very young, untouched by the cynicism that past mistakes and disappointments breed. He hesitates to say _innocent_ \- what he feels for her has never been innocent - but naive enough to want to throw himself at her feet, to clutch her hands to his chest and tell her that it still isn't too late. He could take her from here. They could run away, flee to where no one would think to look. Let this be a regret and not a mistake, a start instead of an ending.

But where would they go? Even if there was such a place, she would never leave. If she was the kind of woman who could, he wouldn't love her like he does.

And he loves her, this woman who cries in silence, without trembling, thin trails of tears on her pale cheeks like silver streams of meltwater in the snow. He reaches, just to clasp her hand, and her fingers are cold as frostbite against his skin.

"Maker willing, this is the last thing I will ever ask of you."

"Had I more to give you, I would give it." And yet he feels strangely empty, heart sluggish in his chest like branches that creak with rime. "He won't forgive you." He pauses. "Either of us."

"No," she says, her voice a wave that hisses up the sand so far that there is nothing left of it to return to sea. "He won't."


End file.
